Outer suburbs' transport woes driving heart disease, obesity epidemic

Decades of under-investment in transport links on Melbourne's fringe have had serious health impacts – and more than $150 billion is needed to address the problem.

One in four residents on Melbourne’s booming fringe now spends more than two hours a day in their car, new Melbourne University research has found, with residents of the city’s growth suburbs more likely than people in the rest of the city to have heart disease or obesity issues.

Melton GP Marcus Watson in Melton this week.Credit:Jason South

Melton GP Marcus Watson, who often spends more than an hour stuck in crawling traffic on his way to the CBD, has lived experience of this growing imbalance between inner and outer Melbourne – both as a doctor and as an occasional commuter.

Dr Watson has in recent times reduced the time he spends travelling to central Melbourne, but said the unpredictability of the commute still made it a nightmare.

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“It’s so unpredictable," he said.

"It might take half an hour, it might take an hour and 15 minutes.”

Dr Watson said he regularly treated patients with preventable illnesses, such as diabetes, and has recommended they exercise regularly. But their time outside of work, he said, was generally spent on commuting long distances – or sitting idly in traffic.

“This is the very time they should be going for walks, spending time with their families,” he said.

“That’s two hours a day in a car that would [allow them to do] all of that. The very people who don’t need any more stress in their lives, have the problems of a lack of infrastructure compounding their stress.”

The Melbourne University research, published on Thursday, reveals an additional $160 billion would need to be spent on transport infrastructure and other services by 2031 – more than the Andrews government’s current building boom – to overcome the congestion costs borne by outer Melbourne’s residents.

The work found “a correlation between heart disease and car use for the journey to work”, higher reporting of obesity, and “lower rates of heart disease in local government areas whose residents made more use of public transport”.

And it finds that Melbourne has had too high a population growth rate over the past 25 years relative to the level of investment committed by state and federal governments to support this growth.

The study finds the pain of this under-investment has largely been borne by residents in the city's six fastest growing outer Melbourne council areas – Cardinia, Casey, Hume, Melton, Whittlesea and Wyndham – where incomes went backwards relative to the rest of the state between 1992 and 2017.

Several key health and well-being markers in these areas were notably worse than for inner and middle Melbourne, the research found.

The report finds that Plan Melbourne, the key strategic blueprint for the city that aimed to curb sprawl, is not working.

Instead, the city is sprawling faster than ever, with outer Melbourne taking almost 60 per cent of the city's growth in the five years to 2016, while inner and middle Melbourne took just 20 per cent each.

The Melbourne University report was co-authored by John Stanley, one of the architects of Plan Melbourne for both Labor and Coalition state governments. Also behind the work, completed with funding from the Municipal Association of Victoria, was Melbourne University's Janet Stanley and economist Peter Brain from the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research.

The study divided Melbourne’s councils into three categories – inner, middle and outer – and looked at economic and social well-being data across a range of factors.

It found resoundingly that the outer urban fringe, where population growth has been the strongest between 1992 and 2017, was also the most disadvantaged.

“This can be partly attributed to poor access to well-paid jobs, due to distance, inadequate roads and poorer access to public transport,” the report found.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne acknowledged there was more work to do to bring about the aims outlined in Plan Melbourne, and said the government would continue to encourage housing growth in established suburbs, "close to jobs and transport, where there is plenty of land supply, as well as in urban renewal areas".

Clay Lucas is a senior reporter for The Age. Clay has worked at The Age since 2005, covering urban affairs, transport, state politics, local government and workplace relations for The Age and Sunday Age.